Welcome to Nuclear Pledge

Nuclear pledge relaunch Now that the Government is going ahead full tilt with its nuclear power programme, Nuclear Pledge (which began in 2006) has relaunched! Please sign the pledge and ask your friends to join you!

Thorium - not green, not viable and not likely. All you ever wanted to know about thorium as a nuclear fuel in this hard hitting report published by four former FoE directors. And no, thorium is not the answer to the world's energy problems.

Nuclear power is expensive - so expensive that it needs huge subsidies and / or price guarantees to make it viable. And who has to pay the cost? We do - the British public and British companies. We are already facing an £85 billion liability for nuclear waste costs from existing nuclear stations - the whole cost of our existing nuclear power program adds up to many hundreds of billions of pounds.

And as we see from Fukushima, a single severe nuclear accident can lead to:

hundreds of billions of pounds of direct costs;

thousands of square kilometres rendered uninhabitable;

electricity rationing and power-downs;

severe, long term harm to the entire national economy;

widespread damage to human health affecting many thousands of people.

But the UK Government is determined to go ahead with a whole new generation of nuclear power, sidelining renewables and energy efficiency.

Energy Secretary Ed Davey - like Chris Huhne before him, a vocal opponent of nuclear power while in opposition - has abandoned his promise to oppose nuclear subsidies. He and his civil servants are now exercising all their ingenuity to finding ways to subsidise nuclear power: rigging the carbon market, privatising liabilities, and exempting the nuclear industry from its full insurance costs.

As for renewables and efficiency, once the bills are paid for decommissioning old power stations, discharging nuclear waste liabilities and subsidising new nuclear build, there's just not much money left!

My promise to resist

I hereby pledge to resist the UK Government's nuclear power programme by all or any of the following means:

refusing to pay a nuclear surcharge contained in energy bills; and paying the money into a 'green fund' to finance renewable energy and energy efficiency;

voting in the next General Election for a party committed to a green electricity strategy based on renewables and efficiency, and which rejects nuclear power;

writing to politicians, energy companies, newspapers, magazines and other media, and posting on websites and social networks, expressing my opposition to nuclear power;

engaging in other campaigns, non-violent actions, civil disobedience, etc, to oppose nuclear power and support a green energy future.